Same Same
Page 17
on floor of public toilet
head in hands, staring down barrels of surefire disaster, on floor of public toilet. The tiles are cool and wet and the smell is faux-lime and atrocious. I cannot even remember now the smell of the tree-limes out in the meatspace
2. Walking
a specific path (on a journey)
just: around (in a fog)
on or near high ledge (in despair)
pacing
pacing
pacing
pacing
(etc.)
3. Running
away (common)
toward (rare)
in a pile of paper. I put a single sheet over my face, and occasionally blow on it, and it rises and falls again, gentle. Repeat until it gets too hot and itchy under there.
4. Lying
face upward (common)
face downward (rare)
body downward, head upward (impossible)
5. Standing
at desk
over project
under project
back from project in order to assess it, usually through a single squinted eye
under Sword of Damocles
before a mirror, in thrall to the uncanny
6. Crouched
to spring into action
to shield oneself from blows
7. Hanging
out
ten
by a thread
from hands from a bar which is how some people do chin-ups, but I just hang there sometimes
from feet (gravity boots), which is how I saw someone in a movie once do sit-ups. Jk I don’t do this, nobody does
from neck until dead (not me, obvs, but, one fellow, several weeks ago. In her closet, of all places & you’d think there wouldn’t be enough room, side to side, but also, vertically, from the knot of the noose to the, the overripe blueberries which are now the tips of her swollen toes. The admin in his shock at this discovery left the flat’s door open and so we all crowded around the narrow doorway, jostling to see, and some got a look in while others craned but no go. This may have been a dream though, Idk.)
8. Looking
Outward
Inward
Both @ same time
9. Speaking
loudly
quietly
into a jawbone mic, like at a Discourse™. This is speaking quietly and loudly, simultaneously. And though I am far from taking my turn at a Discourse™, I am allowed, periodically, to practice in my room and have even been given guidelines about how to construct one; the timings and intonations, etc. A Discourse™. Sigh. Soon, I hope
about something, or someone
about oneself
to oneself
to oneself, about oneself (worst case)
10. Expressing
Pensive (chin—>hand)
Generally dramatic (eyes—>sky)
Ashamed (eyes—>floor)
Offended (crossed arms)
At peace (smile, eyes shining)
At the edge of a precipice (frown, eyes shining)
Dangerous (really big smile, eyes shining)
Inert (…)
Disapproving (hands on hips)
Confident (steeple-fingers)
Working through (brow wrinkled)
Troubled (brow furrowed)
Lying (dartin’ eyes)
Sardonic (close-lipped smile, eyes rolled back)
Perverted (wink)
Etc., etc. (there are a lot more of these)
11. Misc. Other Exercise
Sweating
Clenching
Panting
Tapping on my open palm, as if it contained my absent device; speaking to my cupped palm, as if it contained said absent device
Fending off (a fellow, recently. He was kind of shuffling down one of the Pleasure Center’s nerve-line hallways toward me—the whole thing was so strange Imho—and I thought he was the Media Theorist, but he didn’t seem to recognize me, and the next thing I know he’s speaking in a loud and borderline aggressive fashion at me and actually kind of physically “in my zone” as it were, so I have to kind of almost wrestle him off, and if the whole attack was in fact a prompt, then it was simultaneously too subtle for understanding and too violent not to jar me completely. So: ineffectual)
Providing and receiving prompts. Every day I learn more about how these provocations function. Mr. Al’Hatif explains that, though some prompts are given intentionally (as in the attack mentioned above in Misc. Other Exercise, Letter e), some prompts occur spontaneously, at random. In fact, any occurrence at all could be seen as a potential creative stimulus. “Let’s say,” Ousman continues, “that you were to meet someone who is not a fellow…say, if you accidentally collided with a random woman on the winding streets of a foreign city…she falls to the ground, you help her up…this could be seen as a challenge to work that particular stranger’s imagined life and interiority into your project in some manner or other.”
“Could the providing of the prompt itself be a prompt?” I ask him. And he shrugs. “Only if your project were a project about projects.”
Water aerobics (at 4:00 in the gym)
W/ Miss Fairfax: she pushes on me, and I resist, and then I push on her, and she resists, so it isn’t all that sexy when I really consider it, and as she’s been fairly cross recently these exercises have taken on a more aggressive flavor. Still though
Push-ups. I’m up to twenty. (Jk I can do ten, but plan on rapid improvement)
Apologizing (I do this every day in a variety of ways. Contrition is hard, especially when faked, but I am determined to win Miss Fairfax back over. I have to. I will)
Feeling outrage. I am just tucking back into that enormous (enormously tedious and difficult) novel I am, obstinately, against my better judgment, still attempting to read, when I find another piece of paper stuck in between the pages. It must have flown in my balcony window like the others and wedged itself in there. Where are the cleaning crews? Where is the bloody maid? What has become of all decorum here? Pps. “Time Will Tell”: possible Fundament? (Imagine the coming world)
Chemical withdrawal (fuck you, Dennis). My right cheek is dull-aching something dreadful both cheeks actually and I realize that I’ve clamped my teeth down hard, I’m breathing like a saw, cutting a log, and I need…but can’t…
28
(THE PAPER CONTINUED)
The paper is back on the desk. It’s come a long way to get here, but it seems content to just do nothing.
A window is open, so an occasional breeze riffles a corner of it. But not enough to budge the paper from its position (parallel to each of the desk’s sides and equidistant from all its edges). Disappointing.
Time passes, during which lots is happening around the paper. Directly under the paper. Under the desk, to be precise. Here’s a man. He’s curled up in there, in the desk’s dark underpass, hugging himself fiercely, sweating furiously, breathing in shallow gasps, incapable of satiation. Some severe need has seized him up. He’s swearing. His eyes look thick and rheumy. His nose is running, and he’s yawning, compulsively, like a nervous cat.
He’s got a sma
ll orange bottle in his fist. It’s empty, but he’s trying, stupidly, to lick some of the thin powder, the pills’ residue, out of its insides. The bottle is stuck on his tongue now.
He pulls it off with an audible plop.
(Plop!)
He lies back down, and simply moans for a spell.
(THE DISPUTE)
The refectory; breakfast at the Good Table. Disputant 1 and Disputant 2 are at it again. And just listen to them go.
Few people present can follow the dispute: Disputant 1’s line of reasoning is confusing, and Disputant 2’s equally elusive. But they prattle on and on. It is all agonizingly dense. Not only is the quarrel impenetrable, but it seems intentionally so. One has the sense that these dialogical thickets are like hedge mazes, built to get lost in. That is to say that there is a vague consensus among us listeners that the argument between the Disputants is being presented for our benefit, and that some sort of higher signification is being lent to the difficult proceedings. We fellows who listen in just can’t quite get at what that signification is, though it is on the tips of our tongues.
In the end, everyone at the Good Table becomes very, very bored, and simply drifts off, though I stay behind to ponder the eternal argument. After positing (and then rejecting) several alternative rationales, I begin to believe that the dispute between Disputant 1 and Disputant 2 is being enacted not in order to resolve the particular question at hand, nor to draw up ideological battle lines in relation to this particular question, but, rather, the whole thing is performed in order to carry out a theater: a theater of boredom. A performative boredom.
Boredom is the exemplary state for fomenting a hyperawareness of time. Time: its flexibility; its hazy, labile, variable nature. For this reason (I’m guessing)—in order to turn our thoughts to the passage perception of time—the arguing pair, Disputant 1 and Disputant 2, create and mount: boredom events. (It could, in fact, be said of both of them that they should be called “the Boredom Artists,” rather than the appellations they are known by, but, had they advertised their intention to bore us, no one would have attended their events, and the very point of the debates would have been missed.) Once I realize that we are not so much suffering through their arguments as much as we are attending their open studios, I begin to enjoy their fractious company. It can be said that so far, their performances have been very successful, not due to the one (and only one fellow; me) who has understood the purpose of the thing, but, rather, due to that majority who don’t understand—those who feel, in their very marrow, the tedium of listening to them—their monotonous dialectic—and who, irritated, leave the field of battle and continue on with their days.
These boredom-susceptible listeners are the work’s intended audience, and they have received—if not consciously—the message behind Disputant 1 and Disputant 2’s project. I see behind the curtain, now, and so can no longer participate.
The admin next to me is not even paying attention, though. Scrolling her device like she despises it (or the arguing couple).
Or the rest of us? Do they resent us—the admins? Do they dislike their charges?
I’m certainly no one’s favorite. Nm, as the big news, here on Team Percy, is that I have successfully pulled one over on the admins with my most recent trip to the Same Same shop. There was a hubbub of some stripe during a meal, and I seized the moment. No one saw me sneak away, and, well, mission accomplished. My identity papers have been properly delivered. When I dropped my papers down on the counter, my Same Same man did not even blink. Swept the passport up, and it is out of my hands now. I will have it back again soon; and when I do, I’ll have it back twofold, so to speak, so the risk will have paid off.
I simply need to wait.
I am assuming that I won’t need to hand my passport over to the Director in the next few days. A gamble to be sure. But, if I am asked to give up my booklet—god forbid—my plan is to stall. I can just stall. Stall, stall, stall. I’m good at stalling. Good at speaking around a topic.
“Yes. Yes, you are,” Mr. Al’Hatif mutters.
(I SEE IT!)
Noon in the Arts Pavilion, and the work on display is uninspiring. Self-indulgent. There are plenty of installations—things flung about in otherwise empty white rooms. A few pieces made of wood and steel, a few made from dust and other forms of debris, while others are made of light: diodes, pixels, videotape. These visuals are so imitative of one another that I wonder if they are all made by the same artist. But no: different works by different fellows, who must all belong to the same school. All of the films looping in the lobby consist of the artists themselves performing their daily activities—eating, exercising, napping, speaking, yawning, kneeling, walking, etc., etc.—but now, framed on the monitors, each of these actions is elevated through being rendered aesthetic. And so we watch the monitors as gallery-goers, rather than (I want to say: voyeurs?). None of it interests me particularly, though I spend what I hope to be the requisite time looking, and asking the requisite questions of the artists:
“How did you arrive at your ideas?” “How long did it take to accomplish?”
So on. (The usual.)
There are also several works of collage, mostly made from tattered magazines, printouts, newspapers, works-in-progress composed entirely of images appropriated from other sources; works by other fellows. Some of these artists had never drawn an original line—not a one.
“Theft? Plagiarism?” I ask, palpitating the notion, and wondering, for a brief moment, if such a practice of collage wouldn’t work just as well for a…never mind. No one is listening anyway.
Many other pieces are so highly conceptual that I cannot even begin formulating responses. Only one set of works-in-progress truly interests me, and this is a set of intimate portraits, painted in ghostly shades of gray, upon black canvas, with bright primary colors, almost Rorschach-like blobs, scattered over them. The colored-in areas are seemingly random (though occasionally show horizontal symmetry). Bright patches of yellow, red, green, and blue. The portraits are of heads. Just heads. They are lined up on a backlit wall, such that the colors practically jump out of the frames. The artist himself is present in the gallery, white-smocked, and explains in great detail that he is attempting a positivist, rather than phenomenological, interpretation of his subjects; that these portraits are pictures of actual states of affairs, the subjects as they “really are. As they think, that is, the emotions which come over them, while they are sitting for my portraits.” It is as if he were using an enhanced eye of some sort to peer into souls, penetrating the visible, the meat, in order to attain and reveal our most personal information.
“What do you think?” he asks me.
It is at this moment that the Mysterious Woman wanders in. As she enters the studio, slamming the door behind her, now looking around her at the art on the walls, I suddenly have the distinct feeling that the membrane around the world is getting thinner, and that the borders between my thoughts and the world are becoming more permeable; threatening rupture. The Mysterious Woman is one such thought. Because I was thinking her, and now here she is Irl, and my mind attempts to find a form with which to describe her shape. Her narrow, northern face; those deep-set eyes. And while I map and index her, she turns, and sees me.
“Hello, Percy. Which one is yours?”
“My—”
“Your portrait.”
“I haven’t sat for one.”
“Haven’t you? I thought everyone had.”
The artist, noting our conversation, nods to the Mysterious Woman.
“He’s right over here,” the artist says, pointing at a picture on the wall.
They look at me expectantly as I examine my portrait.
“God, I see it,” I say, though thinking that it looks nothing like me.
The man begins explaining the picture to us, and I listen as if in
a dream.
“This part is particularly sharp,” he says, though whether he is indicating my mental acuity or the quality of his work I can’t be sure. He puts a hand on the Mysterious Woman’s shoulder, and then points at my milky, color-splotched portrait again, and adds, “rather illuminating actually.”
“It is beautiful,” she says.
Having her here, examining my portrait—this illustration of my supposed innermost content—is discomfiting, but I grin and bear it.
“Yes, you’ve really captured my likeness,” I say, thinking all the while that no likeness, when frozen in time, can ever truly be a representation. It may replace that thing, but it may never represent it as an occasion of experience.
Meanwhile the artist is nattering away like a spirit medium, channeling my ghost.